NEW DELHI: The Ministry of Education has appointed Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit, currently a political science professor at the dept of politics and public administration, Savitribai Phule University in Maharashtra as the first woman Vice-Chancellor (VC) of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).  

The 59-year-old Pandit replaces M Jagadesh Kumar, the acting VC at JNU to become the first woman to lead the institution and has been an alumna of JNU where she pursued her MPhil as well as PhD in International Relations. 

Pandit who has been appointed for five years started her career at Goa University in 1988 where she taught political science and moved to Pune University in 1993.  Her introduction says she has held administrative positions in various academic bodies and has been a member of the University Grants Commission (UGC), the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and visitor's nominee to central universities.

However, as soon as her appointment was announced several people took to social media to point out that Pandit has been open with her critical opinions on JNU and also about her political alliances. Besides some unconfirmed reports also said that she was appointed despite a negative report by Savitribai Phule University which has informed the union government that her increments were withheld on two occasions due to alleged misconduct. 

Note Public interest lawyer and activist Prashant Bhushan posted on Twitter, "New JNU VC Has Supported Genocide Calls, Attacked Students, Farmers." He also added that Pandit has put out her Hindutva right-wing political views out in the open boldly but she has now deleted her account, after exposure.

Several images of her tweets which have been claimed to be deleted were reposted in which she has purportedly used a lot of keywords like Khalistanis and Jihadis to respond to several social issues including with the farm protestors of 2021-22.  

Some of those images show that Pandit had backed calls for genocide and attacks on students and farmers in the recent past.  For instance, in one tweet Pandit has apparently advocated the persecution of civil rights activists, branding them as 'mentally-ill jihadists in Chinese style. 

In another image of one of her Tweets dated 16 May 2019 she terms Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination as “sad”, she said although both Gandhi and Godse read Gita but took different lessons. "Godse thought the action was important and identified the solution for a united India in the assassination of one person Mahatama Gandhi. Sad," the tweet read.